AT The FinDevr Conference … This Credit Card Walks Into a Bar

I attended the FinDevr2015 conference in San Francisco as a guest of WWC (Women Who Code). This is a conference for financial technology developers. Here are some observations.

The venue:

This was the first conference I had been to at the UCSF conference center. It’s in what people refer to as the “Dogpatch” area of SF which is an up and coming neighborhood. Boy was this nice! You can see a picture of our lunch setup here. I spoke to one attendee from Texas who would not believe me when I said this was a typical beautiful fall day in San Francisco – he just sat there amazed the whole time.

The delightful outdoor lunch at the UCSF conference center.

Favorite sessions:

1) I was completely impressed by the Mifos initiative. They have developed the world’s first open source financial services platform and it’s already deployed to millions of people to help drive financial inclusion. Next up for them is LibreFinance, an app framework.

Markus Geiss steps through the open source finsvc platform from Mifos.

2) I missed their official session but got a 1:1 demo from Ed Gonzalez, CTO of Financial Apps. It was fun to watch Ed go rogue on a PC instead of his usual Mac, and talk Ruby with him. They make taking in consumer financial data easier, so for anyone looking at this it is worth a gander. Apparently Ed typically leaves demos to those more inclined. It was fun to watch his collegues watch him give a demo, which apparently does not happen too often. Well done Ed!

3) By the afternoon I was ready to be both informed and entertained. Braintree‘s Justin Woo did not disappoint! (Disclosure: we are in a Braintree program). I learned some helpful tips for driving checkout conversion including minimizing steps and prepopulating available information.

Justin Woo from Braintree works his payments jokes with helpful tips on increasing checkout conversion.

Would have liked to see:

With so may great APIs being discussed I was ready to code! For next time, I’ll suggest a lunchtime hackathon with participating company APIs. Or even an afternoon coding session for a couple hours, with cocktails.

Thanks to Women Who Code for hosting me.

P.S. If you can’t read the slide with Justin’s joke it goes like this … So a credit card walks into a bar. He says to the bartender: “I’ve been having a hard time meeting people.” The bartender says: “Wait, aren’t you supposed to be good at generating … interest?”

Michelle Bonat is the CEO and Founder of Data Simply, the data sommelier for investment professionals. Learn more at www.DataSimply.com and connect with her on Twitter at @mbonat.